The project
The story of the project
I am from Naples, Italy. Probably this should explain most of the reasons, rationale, and arguments of this project. I was living in the US while the most dramatic moments of the "waste crisis" occurred in Naples and in the entire region. The geographical distance frustrated my desire to participate in the protests and in the public debate on the possible alternatives to incinerators and landfills. I was in the US studying the environmental history of Italian migrations there, their ways of using and seeing nature, so different from the WASP Americans (https://migration-environment.webnode.com/). But, while I was researching about my Italians in the Land of Dreams, I discovered also something different. In New Haven as well as in California I encountered in flesh, blood, and ink the environmental justice movement. That meeting changed my research about both migration and the environment and my future plan. I decided to start also working on the Neapolitan waste crisis as a case of environmental justice (EJ). This was a challenge because the EJ standard paradigm implies environmental racism, while the racial issue is not significant in the Italian case, of course. Moreover, I was familiar with the study of environmental conflicts in the past (I have written on the history of the resistance of Italian mountain communities to the privatization of forests and on the history of fishing communities and their management of a common resource such as the sea), but as a historian not so much with the study of the present. Nevertheless, as an environmental historian, I have always felt a political commitment in my scholarly work; I have never believed in the objective researcher, ready to deliver the truth without any bias. I have my vision of the world, my political opinions, and my story; my work as a scholar will never be disconnected by all those things.
Hence, my research on the environmental struggles in Campania, Italy, is an experiment to merge Political Ecology and Environmental History, to deliver excellent academic results without loosing my personal involvement in the story. If I have been able to do it, well, this is another story. But I have enjoyed so much trying....
The project
The case study I propose is partially known; in the last few years Naples has attracted worldwide media attention with its images of heaps of garbage, protesters in the streets, and a less visible but more frightening presence--dioxin contamination, emanating from the soil into the famous buffalo mozzarella. The intervention of the European Union, as well as of other international (WHO) and foreign institutions, have signified the trans-national character of the Neapolitan crisis. Nevertheless, the general understanding of this crisis is rather confused; it has been generally viewed as a public health emergency, without an acknowledgment of its structural nature and of the quest for ecological democracy from grassroots activists.
Actually, the plot of this Neapolitan garbage struggle can be either extremely simple or terribly intricate. On the one hand, it can be explained as the usual NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) syndrome: too much refuse and no place to put it, combined with an explosive outburst of the stereotypical “green technophobia” against any technological solution (the incinerator) and the presumed southern-Italian weak civic spirit (Banfield). On the other hand, the narrative can be much more complicated if we consider the history of Camorra’s (the Neapolitan Mafia) illegal dumping and control over entire areas around Naples, the unequal distribution of environmental risks, and local activism as an expression of political participation.
To better understand the Neapolitan case, we need to situate it within the larger context of what Carolyn Merchant has defined as “radical ecology”, a new environmentalism revealing that “the domination of nature entails the domination of human beings along lines of race, class, and gender” (Merchant, 2005: 1). Radical ecology produces ecological distributional conflicts which have questioned the policies used to determine the location of hazards and the distribution of environmental risks and benefits. What is at stake in those conflicts is not simply the efficiency of some technological solutions to environmental problems but the legitimacy of opposing values, interests, and ways of knowledge (Martinez Alier: 150).
As a matter of fact, in those ecological conflicts, new categories and critical tools have emerged, such as those of ecological democracy (Faber), post-normal science (Funtowicz and Ravetz), and environmental justice (EJ) (Baxter; Bryant).
The issues of scientific vs. popular knowledge, the politicization of experts, the role of mass-media, and national vs. super-national governance are aspects which make this case study a perfect laboratory in which to analyze ecological distributional conflicts. With “LaRes” I intend to demonstrate that environmental conflicts are not only proof of tragic inequalities and dispossession but have also been a powerful agent in shaping the social-natural hybrid landscapes in which they occur. Conflicts are producers of communities; they create identities and redraw public and private space. The “landscapes of resistance” give new meanings to places and memories because fighting always needs to invent/reinvent the past for the sake of the future.
B.1. b) Premises and background
The rise of a new environmentalism, different from the traditional one, and the corresponding development of a scholarship dedicated to it are the basic premises and background of my project.
“Ecological justice” is an expression coined by Low and Gleeson (1998) which has been used to indicate the struggles for an equal distribution of environmental risks and benefits among classes, races, and genders. According to Robert Bullard, one of the leading scholars in the EJ field, the struggle over a PCB landfill in Warren County, North Carolina in the early 1980s can be considered as the starting point of the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM) (Bullard). In the last few decades, grassroots organizations throughout the US have challenged government and corporate power in an effort to improve their neighbourhoods and to affirm their right to a healthy, clean, and safe environment.
Scholars from various disciplines have studied the EJM. Sociologists, anthropologists, (ecological) economists, political scientists, law scholars, and environmental historians have contributed to substantial literature on this movement (Bullard; Martinez Alier; Melosi; Pellow; Pulido; Szasz; Hurley; Mitman, Murphy, and Sellers; Blum). Today there is even a scholarly journal devoted to the study of environmental justice (Environmental Justice Quarterly). Thus, there is no discussion about the relevance of the topic in both current affairs and scholarly debates. While the EJM has challenged traditional environmental organizations (the so-called “Big Ten”), accused of pursuing a white, middle-class, male environmentalism, it has also questioned some assumptions about environmentalism and its history. The entrance of post-modernism into the environmental realm (above all in environmental history and critical geography), the STS/SSK (Science and Technology Studies/Sociology of Scientific Knowledge) critique of the objectivity of science, and post-colonial studies have contributed to the redefinition of nature, knowledge, and ecological activism. For this project, I will briefly review the main shifts in environmental studies due to the merging of the experience of the EJM with post-modernism and post-normal science.
i) Environmentalism and post-material societies
According to Ronald Inglehart (1990; 1997) the rise of organized environmental concerns should be interpreted as an expression of post-material society and economy in which new needs and identities, different from those of class, mobilize collective action. Therefore, following this line of thinking, ecology becomes an issue only when basic needs have been satisfied; in other words, it remains a luxury for post-industrial citizens. Joan Martinez Alier is the scholar who has criticized this post-material approach most clearly (Martinez Alier: 3). He argues that the belief that environmentalism is a luxury for the rich and well educated simply ignores the fact that for millions nature is not the space of hiking or contemplation, but their working and living environment. Martinez Alier coined the expression “environmentalism of the poor (EOP)” to indicate various forms of ecological activism in which social and environmental issues are blended in a coherent claim for justice.
ii) What is nature, that is the (new) wilderness debate
While a scholar like Raymond Williams could state that nature is a very difficult concept to define, for most people it is not; nature simply represents what is not man-made. This objectivist vision of nature, radically “other” from culture, explains the meager interest of social scientists in the environment. Thus, when environmental historian William Cronon published his essay “In Trouble with Wilderness” (1996), it was indeed revolutionary. Cronon’s main point was that wilderness, and nature, are cultural constructions which reflect observers’ ideas rather than simple intrinsic characteristics. Post-colonial studies have reinforced this approach, deconstructing the violence of imperial discourses and policies devoted to protecting “nature” in the colonies (Neumann, 1998; Guha and Gadgil). The main legacy of this new approach has been a radical critique of the dichotomy of the nature/work paradigm (R. White).
iii) Overcoming humans vs. nature approach, that is, nature as if class-gender-race mattered
The merging of a new environmental movement with new visions of nature and its meanings has challenged this idea of indistinct “human agency”. Fresh studies have demonstrated how strongly class-gender-race differences have affected relationships to nature (Merchant, 1995). Even the “good” policies of preservation (constitution of national parks), and sanitation (urban regulations) were not immune from the unequal consequences based on class-gender-race. Scholars, especially environmental historians, have demonstrated how minorities and subaltern groups have often paid high prices because of those politics (Jacoby; Steinberg; Warren).
iv) From climax to a post-normal science
As Donald Worster has illustrated, the crisis of Odum’s equilibrium model (climax) has questioned the idea of a natural order we should know and preserve, transforming nature into “a landscape of patches, changing continually” (Worster, 1995: 7-8). At the same time, Foucault’s critique of the Enlightenment, adopted in STS/SSK studies, has become a structural critique of the positive sciences and their claims of objectivity (Latour; Morin). The dichotomy between democratic consensus, built on popular participation, and scientific consensus, determined by peer review processes, is at the core of what Funtowicz and Ravetz have called post-normal science. When dealing with uncertainty on values, interests, and scientific assumptions, they propose a post-normal scientific approach grounded in an “extended peer community” which, rather than excluding experts, includes communities in the production/evaluation of knowledge. Giacomo D'Alisa has been the first scholar who has applied the post-normal science approach to the Campania case (see his articles in the webpage Papers and other materials produced by us)